


For Tomorrow We Live

by billspilledquill



Category: Historical RPF, Literary RPF, Regeneration - Pat Barker
Genre: A mix of Keastian rhetoric and Shelleyan obsession with dreams and nature, Dreamscapes, Gen, Hero Worship, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romantic Friendship, War Poetry, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23143264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Owen dreamt of arms and man.
Relationships: Wilfred Owen/C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Wilfred Owen/Siegfried Sassoon
Comments: 17
Kudos: 21





	For Tomorrow We Live

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Owen's letter to his mother on 19 August 1918: '...Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for tomorrow we live, and the day after tomorrow live, live, live. Even in Scarborough I must live; though I feel dead to all these people.'
> 
> The story itself is not drawn from the Regeneration series, although some characterisations are indirectly inspired by it. There will be approximately four people reading this, which is perfectly alright; I simply need to get this out of my system. To those four or so lovely people: enjoy!

The waiting-room was dark and bare.  
He eyed a neat-framed notice there  
Above the fireplace hung to show  
Disabled heroes where to go  
For arms and legs; with scale of price,  
And words of dignified advice  
How officers could get them free.

'Arms and the Man', Siegfried Sassoon

_In the end_

At Scarborough, he wrote to Sassoon: _This “Wild with all Regrets” was begun & ended two days ago, at one grasp. If simplicity, if imaginativeness, if sympathy, if resonance of vowels, make poetry I have not succeeded. But if you say “Here is poetry,” it will be so for me. What do you think of my vowel-stunt in this, and “Vision”? Do you consider…_ so on, so forth, etc. Owen sat at the frigid banks for long and thought of Sassoon saying so and so; proceeded to write with the ideal Sassoon dictating thus and thus. In sights of his dreams, Sassoon would lay his brown hand on his forearm, his eyes settling on the woven window panes of Craiglockhart’s white rooms and talked of poetry. 

Taken by a fervent desire to go forth, to shout, to live (‘this’, he wrote, ‘being the philosophy of many soldiers’), Owen sowed his seeds of the future to Sassoon, dedicated to him with a stroke of pen (‘May I?’). Owen ought to be a mirror, made beautiful to what was distorted, added beauty to the most deformed, to marry exultation and horror, where man ought to see himself everywhere and utterly reflected; to retain some pity in it before he closed his eyes and dreamt. 

Ought Owen talk about dreams? When he dreamt it was always quiet. There was no question about his steady recovery—he was no longer neurasthenic, though he may be neurotic if only to the spasm that overtook him during sleep— but ought Owen discuss them as they were finite, maddening, or beautiful? The fruitful winter of Scarborough and dirty snow were not lost to him; he rather liked it here. That was not it. 

There was Tailhade, the almost hero of his youth, preparing for his duel, writing pacifist pamphlets. Owen likened himself a French Calvinist, had wanted to join the French Army, then Artists' Rifles, then to the Italians; hesitated, and finally went with the English for Keats and Shakespeare. Owen remembered, his dreams were never ones of ardent glory; they had always been shielded with a confrontational duality that characterised Tailhade’s actions, and later, Sassoon’s. 

Dreams about the middle of March, falling through a shell-hole, his head firmly still on the cellar, a candle wavering the guttering gold that Sassoon had once described were not uncommon. They filled with bouts of awful labour at Shrewsbury and Bordeaux; bouts of amazing pleasure in the Pyrenees and play at Craiglockhart; bouts of religion at Dunsden; bouts of horrible danger on the Somme; bouts of poetry always; of sympathy for the oppressed always. It was affectionate, almost intimate; the home in War, the home that War distilled. No, he thought, he shan’t talk about the dreams. 

On New Years’ Eve, he wrote to his mother: _It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them._ And so he went. 

* * *

_November 1917_

They spent a whole of a hot, cloudless afternoon together staring vapidly ahead. It wasn’t cowardice; hardly contempt; after all, the day was quite beautiful. They talked about writing. 

_No beauty here_ , Sassoon would say in dismissal of his older sonnets, the arc of his brows curving, no seeking. _You know why Narcissus drowned._ Owen might have told him where he went wrong and choose Orpheus as the suitable metaphor instead; but Sassoon didn’t, so Owen didn’t, and the image of Orpheus’ steel helmet and descent into hell (‘down some profound, dull tunnel’) formed in his mind and left it there singing alone at the back of his head, throbbing still. 

They strolled down the lane with cordial idealism. His companion usually opted for cynicism, or at least a semblance thereof, but as the morning lightened on his Patrician features, Sassoon blinked with a stubborn spark that Owen dared not name.

If Owen dared, there would be words. He wished for no other companion in any shape or form. He embraced it all: Sassoon’s intimidating height, his self-contained snobbery, the established boredom between his brows; _the wild prattles_. Shakespeare read vapid after this; Owen thought of _The Last Meeting_ , the hitch of breath when he discovered _The Death-Bed_. How, with great setting of poetic feat, he might have been the youth, and, in a frenzy of thought, touched his lips to song. 

‘I’d like to announce that I am still very much inclined to stab your leg with a pen-knife,’ Sassoon said when their long-stretched shadows overlapped, as it was custom of their walks. ‘Especially when you’re not saying anything to change my mind.’ A pause. Owen took the time to notice the unbuttoned collar, where trembling hands had been. ‘The dead… are more real than the living,’ he continued, ‘because they are complete.’

Owen swayed on his soles, shaking off dirt. Sometimes panic would swell when he thought them stuck; the action became so synonymous with death that Owen held his breath, waiting for the hit. For a moment he was lost. The sun came down short in Edinburgh, its mood shifted as quickly as the next-door patient, shaking the bed at three and crying horrors at four. It was alright; in the trenches, sleep was rarer than waking up. Owen remembered that _it reminds me of the dead_. 

‘Perhaps if I “write” anything in dug-outs or talk in sleep a squad of riflemen will save you the trouble of buying a dagger,’ he said lightly. The words resonated in the click-a-clack of shoes, the safe concrete that they hit on. The ground was solid stuff. Sassoon’s lips twitched. 

‘I have will for France too,’ Sassoon said, ‘I have will for war.’

‘Hm,’ Owen said, ' _permitte divis cetera_ ’, his tongue rolling unfamiliarly along. He permitted himself to look at Sassoon, whose face darkened, yet the eyes held the same quality of affection that one would look when the subject was dear. It reassured him; it frightened him. Owen didn’t doubt love to be grand or harmonious. He simply didn’t know that it would fix him. In different skies, Owen would have fixed Sassoon. With a loud thudding in his chest (‘An ecstasy of fumbling/ Fitting the helmets just in time’), Owen came to believe that they have fixed each other instead. 

‘Preaching is your domain. I want none of it,’ Sassoon said. 

‘It is everyone’s business.’ He meant the corruption, the Church role played, but Sassoon knew, so he didn’t. ‘I am a primitive Christian,’ he added to no effect.

Owen had yet to talk about his experience in the vicarage, but he ought soon. If he were to die before him, Sassoon had to be his chronicler; the need to be immortalised in one of Sassoon’s sonnets, like Shakespeare’s, like Michelangelo’s, a single metaphor for all that was dear and young and beautiful. Poetry was his haven, where Sassoon looked, and felt, wholly and intently, with the same as that of heaven, and Abraham’s bosom, and of the baby that sucked Abraham’s bosom (supposing he lived long enough ago): desperate desire, and the will to act upon it. 

‘I am no Christian,’ Sassoon answered, tilting his head back, eyes on the gray sky as if he accepted that it would fall. 

‘So was Shelley, yet there is talk of the overhanging heaven,’ Owen shrugged, ‘you never lacked topics about Cain. “ _He was the grandest of them all,_ ”’ he quoted carefully, and the delightful spark of recognition from Sassoon made him continue, ‘ _”God always hated Cain.’ He bowed his head— The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead_.”’ He let the beat wash them awake. ‘It’s beautiful.’

His tone shifted; something of a tutor in him yet. Owen taught Sassoon when he went wrong the same way he taught a frail French boy how to hold a flint-lock; the boy’s nimble fingers testing the weapon, then, upon realizing how strong they are, how easily it can be held there, to his heart, the level of the cleavage, he let him. But it was a dream; he simply advised the boy on his father’s death. Sassoon looked at him; this would not happen again soon. But Owen would not have contradicted him either. His memory followed back to the boy in Bordeaux, a young Rimbaud with the most romantically beautiful eyes he had ever beheld, asking a question about death. 

Soon, soon, soon. Sassoon shook his head swiftly. ‘Pish-posh. Anyone can be Christ; it is cheaper than a razor. Out there—’ he trailed off. ‘Yes. It’s fashionable to have beliefs; one might get one before affording a hat. I wrote about Cain to illustrate a point. The Bible is about points. Allegories.’ For a moment Owen thought his companion might allude to golf, as he was prone to do when moods were heavy with meaning, but the glint in Sassoon’s eyes haven’t faded. It was his turn to speak. 

‘So I am now,’ Owen said, ‘I am making a point.’

‘I shan’t peg you an admirer of Horace. It’ll ruin my resolution about war,’ Sassoon declared with a vague degree of seriousness, then gently declared, ‘I must say, your Latin is horrid.’ 

‘One wouldn’t know on paper.’

‘There will always be syntax. Grammar.’

Owen huffed, ‘my grammar is quite good. Passable, at least.’

‘ _Nil desperandum,_ ’ Sassoon laughed. The sound circled Owen’s brain like pipe smoke. ‘I am by no means an academic— tedious. A lay-off. In no way I am qualified to scold you on your interpretation of Ancients.’ Sassoon pursed his lips, and Owen remembered: _yes, I saw. He was Christ, stiff in the glare, his eyes on mine_. ‘Would you like to go in?’ Sassoon asked, yet didn’t slow down the pace when they reached the front door. 

‘Of course. I am rather hungry,’ Owen went along, and together they stepped toward the dining room with the same sounding steps that made him knock on Sassoon’s door past August. When he died, of course, the picture of Sassoon’s purple, sonnet-worthy gown retaliated, badged his head, soaked bloody. But now—sweet, precious now— they befit themselves in the warm lies of friendship; none of them decided to take notice of the churning of Owen’s stomach, its growling not unlike the warming of machines. Owen attributed it to hunger as it screeched. 

* * *

Owen opened the envelope in a quiet corner of the Club Staircase. He sat on the stairs and groaned a little, and then went up and loosed off a _ground_ , a _Gothic vacuum_ of a letter, which he ‘put by’ (as Sassoon would recommend for such effusions) until he could think over it again. 

Their last evening was spent at a quiet Club in Edinburgh, Owen ought to leave for London by the midnight train. After a good dinner and a bottle of noble Burgundy had put them in good spirits, Sassoon produced a volume of portentously over-elaborated verse, recently sent to him by the author. From this he began to read extracts— Sassoon looked certain, had looked at him with expectations of mirth— it seemed incongruous now that their most vivid memory would be their convulsions of laughter in a large, leather-covered armchair, arm against arm, shared until Sassoon was incapable of continuing his recital. 

Through the veil of happy tears Owen sensed the radiating heat of his companion beside him and wished Sassoon to be less undemonstrative. They were laughing heartedly, laughed as Owen had never seen him laugh. Drunk with a sense of urgency and hope, Owen clasped their hands together, tight, unnoticeable in their large, brown armchair, and laughed, laughed, laughed. Owen resisted the urge to sing now, uneven and shrill, to pack-up their troubles in their old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile. 

‘ _Grame_!’ Owen exclaimed, catching his breath, ‘whatever it means, it does not intensify my feelings for you by the least— the least _grame_.’

‘There’s more,’ continued Sassoon, lips stretching, his fingers following the next verse in anticipation, ‘o is it true I have become/ This gourd, this gothic vacuum?’

‘Oh dear.’ 

‘Zounds,’ said Sassoon, gone soft and melodic, his large ears coloured. Owen saw the crimson of his lips (‘Watched the magnificence recession of farewell/ Clouding, half gleam, half glower/ And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheeks’), remembered, and did not bother.

Soon, soon, soon. Someday Owen must tell— if not write— about how they sang, shouted, whistled and danced through the dark lanes through Colinton; and how they laughed till the meteors showered around them; falling calm under the winter stars and seeing it so far above them and feeling the good road safe beneath them, they saw the pathway of the spirits for the first time. 

They praised God with louder whistling; knew they loved one another as no men love for long. Which, wrote Owen to Sassoon afterwards, _if the Bridge-players Craig & Lockhart could have been, they would have called down the wrath of Jahveh, and buried us under the fires of the City you wot of._

* * *

The envelope contained a ten pound-note and a little note from Robert Ross, arranging a meeting at 12:30 on Nov. 9th. Owen dined with Ross at the Reform, then came round in the evening to his rooms in Half-Moon Street. He was unnerved but determined; knowing full well the extent of Sassoon’s generosity to allow this in the first place. But Owen couldn’t help to think that he deserved it, that after the suffering of the self and the soul, of sweating his guts out, that there existed a small humble place for him at this table of giants. 

It was a shock, then, when Owen noticed an upstart rodent of a man, who looked equally astonished to find himself there, in which Ross kindly sang out with blessed distinctness that he was indeed ‘Mister Arnnoldd Bennnettt.’ Owen stood up as straight as he could and shook hands with him. 

The same circumstances occurred with Wells, staring at him thoughtfully with a pair of bayonet-coloured eyes. The man talked to him exclusively for one hour and only made him ill at ease when he tried to make him laugh at Bennett’s gaudy handkerchief. 

‘Owen the Poet,’ Ross introduced him thus. He failed to understand whether he flushed out of pride or embarrassment.

It was clear of the place he occupied in the smoke-drowned rooms. He was the newly-discovered little man with some talent to peruse. Owen, who wrote big, was minuscule. Aware, he nonetheless got into a corner with Bennett about Sassoon, whose criticism of his friend couldn’t be more unfair. A subdue sort of jealousy ran through him. He was Sassoon’s newest friend in the bunch; and the images that presented Owen a past Sassoon that he never knew irritated him as much as they fascinated. The ideal Sassoon in his mind supplied a few verses to calm him back to politeness. 

There was no one here whose mind was Truth, or whose body Keats’ synonym for Truth, though he did hold them in high esteem. Too much, so it seemed, that Owen could at times not bring himself to speech; to him poetry was the very-crown of life and constituted its meaning. Sitwell, who was silent for the most part, decided to comment. 

‘Your residence in France have corrupted you, dear fellow,’ he said, ‘this altitude of respect might be charming in a Frenchman, but it is nothing compared to the Englishman’s casual approach to books. You are very modest, Owen. It is time for you to be sturdy at last.’

Owen nodded. He’ll mind his business; he’ll be a good worm. But as he slept that night he dreamt of the war (‘the mad gusts tugging on the wire/like twitching agonies of men among its brambles’), and felt a spark toward old men who hadn’t been to the Front nor been anywhere except pacing behind their doors, writing nor knowing nothing about shell-holes nor counter-attacks (‘the flickering gunnery rumbles/ far off, like a dull rumour of some other war’). 

Owen rolled the December issue of _Daily News_ neatly on the table. Bennett’s article showed how much he wanted peace; how little he knew of war. The need to go back intensified, coiled strong in his stomach, to smell smokes and to record heartbeats of those that still lived. He could not let his war shorten while prolonging that of another. He closed his eyes. He lied awake and imagined a brown, sanguine hand on his forearm; it was the realest thing he had felt in months. 

* * *

_January 1918_

Graves’ wedding was at 2:30. Owen had currently received the proof from the Nation of his first poem that he sent himself: Miners. With shaking hands, reminiscent of his shell-shocked days, he wrote a hearty letter to his mother with the excitement of a child with one guinea in hand, thinking it enough to purchase the world. 

He mentioned it during his lunch with Ross, who congratulated him with a quivering of his black, thick moustache. They laughed when Wells waved his hand but did not move from his table. They made idle conversations, but Owen was in a hurry, a little overwrought with the state of his dress and whether or not it was suitable for a wedding reception. Ross assured him that he looked very decent. 

‘So the snobbery wasn’t Siegfried’s false spoil!’ Ross said in good humour, ‘he has this habit of overwriting people in his letters. I do not trust him with his descriptions; when he writes, it is always his own reflected shame.’ A pause. ‘I don’t suppose you have read Carpenter.’

Owen shook his head, then asked, out of respect if not curiosity, if he should. 

Ross sipped his tea, lowering his eyes thoughtfully. ‘Siegfried will be delighted. And affronted, I gather.’

‘Well, then I won’t,’ was his immediate reply. The fact shook him; Ross smiled the same way his mother did when Owen seemed to have given an unsatisfactory comment on David and Jonathan. They resumed their parting with a handshake and a whisper which made Owen lean in, ‘I did not mean that _you_ will affront him, Wilfred. I suppose in _that_ way he had always been the most Puritan of us all.’ And Owen wondered if he should spend money on Carpenter instead of the newest biography of Keats. 

The wedding itself wasn’t extraordinary. People were few; private friends that Graves greeted warmly if not a little nervously. Owen thought that the bride looked good, but not handsome; a comment that he kept for himself when small-talks with pleasant people occurred, dulling his mind over the state of the visitors’ dress, the size of the viennoiseries and the groom’s calm face yet jittering hands. 

The gift was a set of eleven apostle spoons. Graves found it hilarious. 

‘Where is the twelfth?’

‘Court-martialled for cowardice and currently awaiting execution.’

He got introduced to Moncrieff. Or, rather, the man introduced himself, proud and spoofing, as Owen noted the solid soldier built complete with eczema. With a starchy feel of the vowels, Moncrieff spoke elegantly about the weather. The lameness of his leg left a charming impression, a fresh vision, as Owen was almost getting used to this world of civilians. St James’ Piccadilly’s red bricks were much too red, and the ground too solid, too sturdy. Moncrieff’s eyes spoke of war, and Owen rejoiced in that familiarity amidst the general aura of civic duty and colourful blossoms. 

A member of the War Office, Moncrieff was more a general than a typewriter. They talked freely of French literature, with war brought forth every now and then; although it wasn’t until Moncrieff mentioned Verlaine with a blinded look that Owen understood its meaning. 

‘You are worthy of many poems, Mr. Owen,’ Moncrieff said, ‘you shall be receiving, if not conceiving greatness,’ when he laughed, it was a soft crackle, _‘c'est l'extase langoureuse_ ,’ he began, their eyes transfixed, mouthing soundlessly. The poetry rolled off his tongue most improperly; Owen resisted the urge to frown. 

‘ _C'est la nôtre— n'est-ce pas?_ ’ Owen recited hesitantly, he felt he was being tested; they were whispering among the guests, fluttering movements around them, ‘ _la mienne et la tienne— s'exhale l'humble antienne, par— ce— tiède soir—_ ’ he paused, ‘I do not remember the rest.’

‘That’s quite alright, you are splendid.’

But it wasn’t, nor he was. He wanted, above all, to impress. It was the old story with the boys of his age at Birkenhead, with older and younger boys at Shrewsbury, though this time with a specific goal in mind. More than just a quick fumbling of movements and quick release, Owen desired desire in its purest and most sinful form. He worshipped Eros well, had bound and burnt and slew. Sassoon had a low opinion on that poem, dismissing it as a young poet’s whim (‘laughed/ loosed away my lips’), but he did not want to think about Sassoon now. 

Moncrieff’s hands— bigger, covered in war wounds— seemed to expand when they were on his shoulder. Owen shuddered, a deeper image relapsed his mind and seized hold of him; Moncrieff, seemingly satisfied with his reaction, continued his mal rendition of the French symbolists. 

The wedding wedded; the war warred. They bedded the bed, their movements slow and languid and so very bored; Owen refused not hold the illusion that he did bed someone lest he confused it with someone else. Moncrieff wrote sonnets too mediocre to respond, and the rest continued its due course. He was fond of him— the slow drawing of blinds when his nightmares renewed and tender hands stroking his head— the sighs when Moncrieff would find white in his hair and kiss it, saying, _beautiful, beautiful._

But Owen did not make it worth remembering nor was it memorable. Intimacy existed outside the physical; it disappointed both himself and Moncrieff, yet nothing stopped them from starkly returning to the bed, staring upon the ash of all they burned. 

* * *

‘I can’t secure a home posting,’ Moncrieff said between embraces that weren’t enough to matter, ‘I am dreadfully sorry, my dear.’

Owen sat up; their naked bodies entangled together in a way that made Owen remembered lessons on the original sin: O Adam, what have you done? ‘It is alright,’ Owen said, breathless when Moncrieff stroked him. 

‘Let me—'

‘Charles—’ 

Thoughts lay siege. Swirls on the duality of one’s need to see and to denounce, that of a brave soldier and an endless critic. He felt no use to reveal any of it to Moncrieff; Owen simply sighed and moaned; Moncrieff had a particular rough hand and indulging with a fantasy he did not knew he had, of brown hands and sanguine skin, he brought himself to completion with a cry that was not exactly meant for anyone but the one in his dreams (and mortifyingly, let himself remember, ‘let heart-beat kiss it night and day/ Until the name grow vague and wear away’). 

* * *

_August 1918_

Owen sat at the brown banks of heap in front of the American Women’s Hospital, whilst the steps of Lancaster Gate overlooked Hyde Park, and remembered the amputations. It was distinct modern, he thought, this romance of remembering. He must remember, not think on it. Remembering the stench, recalling the smell (‘through the misty panes and thick green light/ As under a green sea’), but knowing, not thinking. A true poet must be truthful, but Owen allowed himself to leave the arms out of man, man out of thought. 

In his mind’s eye, Sassoon’s arm stretched out to him— the roughness of the skin, the faint burn of the chiselled (how’s that?) skin. Beside him, Sassoon’s back formed a straight line; a soldier’s soldier, Owen’s a poet’s poet. But he oughtn’t think on it. 

‘Tell me how you are.’

‘Good. Very willing to stab someone. You, preferably, if you try to return again.’

‘I would return,’ Owen didn’t budge, ‘if you had said in the heart or brain you might have stabbed me, but you said only in the leg, so I was afraid.’

‘That I would?’

‘The opposite.’

Owen did not realise, nor will he admit, that Sassoon’s voice has startled him. Owen readily forgot the manner from which he spelled the words; downcast and low-pitched, a posh Englishman’s pique. He had forgotten it completely, and only the image of Sassoon grounded him as who he was speaking to. Impossible for anyone can hear him and take him for a German— but Owen remembered: _Siegfried is in London, the victim of a British Sniper_ , and that was all he needed to know. 

Neither decided to look except for the Hyde Park before them. Owen noticed the way Sassoon’s words slurred. Owen was here to say goodbye— though it seemed inappropriate. The silence was holy; the only thing that was prized as much as death. What more was there to say that Sassoon will not better understand unsaid?

Poetry— yes, he supposed. Poetry— _books of the protests of a tortured spirit._ Poetry— ‘O my heart,/ Be still; you have cried your cry, you have played your part!’ Poetry of Sassoon, poetry of War— Siegfried Sassoon looking at the cheap lapels of his uniform, making poetry happen by the brush of a pin. 

‘Do not go,’ Sassoon said, although he sounded uncertain. Sassoon talked about as badly as Wells wrote; he stared at his hands, large and calm on his lap. His manner of slight confusion seized Owen’s heart whole. 

‘You have frightened me,’ Owen said, almost whispering, ‘of course you have. When I heard the news. But for goodness’ sake you haven’t corrupted me. If anything poetry did. Your _Counter-Attack_ frightened me much more than the real one, I assure you.’

‘You do not assure me in the slightest,’ and the bitterness filtered through the same time as the sun; it painted the image yellow and bright, ‘you’re a bundle of eccentricity. You do not assure.’

Owen stood up. He helped Sassoon to do the same— holding the clothed arm that Owen sometimes dreamt about— then released him. Trembling, seized with feelings, Owen said with regret, ‘I am in hasty retreat towards the Front; battles have always been easier there. You wage hopeless war of enduring the old men and women to the End,’ Owen tried, ‘oh, but smile the penny! The sun is warm, the sky is clear, the waves are dancing fast and bright…’

‘Wilfred,’ he said; it always stopped him, ‘write to me.’

His smile faltered, ‘of course I shall. You did say that it would be a good thing for my poetry if I go back.’ Owen remembered hesitating over the line ‘He plunges at me—’ whether the man in his dream came back gargling or gurgling or goggling or guttering. Really, the man could’ve done them all. Owen did, at least. _He_ plunged under the green sea— gargling _and_ gurgling _and_ goggling _and_ guttering _and_ choking _and_ drowning. 

Sassoon opened his mouth and sighed deeply. Owen did the same. Their breath mingled, and the scent of hospital replaced the warm scent of late spring. 

Sassoon mentioned none of it. He threw his head back, baring his throat to the enemy. It was something incredibly dangerous to do. Owen was somehow put back by this action, hopeful of its meaning. Sassoon breathed, ‘I did not smile.’

‘Whatever you mean?’

‘I meant last year. Your letter. I did not have a “blasting little smile” when I read it.’

‘Oh!’ Owen was uneasy, ‘that was a long time ago.’

‘Indeed,’ and now Sassoon did smile, ‘do you think I ought to burn it yet?’

Owen’s nose wrinkled. ‘If you wish so.’

For a moment, Sassoon seemed to think. His shoulders hunched. ‘You love me,’ he said without malice, though he stared on, ‘you hold me as Christ, as Keats. The war is considered just, we that die along it aren’t. You claim pity, you own it, but everyone pities the dead, Wilfred. Will they pity us? Not the soldier, not the poet.’ When he looked at him, his expression was pained. ‘Will they pity _you_?’

Sassoon swung his arms. Their embrace was ideal; the brief glances of a companion that he got along with for a few months, the quiet farewell of a foreign friend. It wasn’t until the remembering of the press of Sassoon’s lips on the crown of his hair that Owen realised that he did not answer. Sassoon’s hair smelled hospital-like, hunter-like, trench-like. For a moment he believed that Sassoon was leaving with him, strolling, hell-bent, ready to take on any danger as they came. 

Suddenly seized by a memory at the Somme, where in the dank air he has perceived, and in the darkness felt, Owen took Sassoon’s arm and pressed (‘blood-shod’). He had not seen any dead that day, but Owen felt he have done worse. They did not say goodbye. 

* * *

_In the beginning_

At Craiglockhart, he wrote to Gunston: _The sun blazed into his room making his purple dressing suit of a brilliance— almost matching my sonnet! He is very tall and stately, with a fine firm chisel’d (how’s that?) head, ordinary short brown hair…_ so on, so forth, etc. Owen sat on his white sheeted-bed and thought about everything and nothing and remembered. This was the second time he ever shared rooms in the Keats-Brown manner, and this time Sassoon was a kin both spiritually and literarily. His hands shook when he fell asleep, curled in the bed, smelling of green gas and Orpheus, steel-helmet, marching on, his back to him. 

Owen remembered the dreams every night. He trembled awake, then, fluttering to a page or two, he mumbled to himself Sassoon’s lines, ‘Because the night was falling warm and still/ Upon a golden day at April’s end/ I thought; I will go up the hill once more/ To find the face of him that I have lost/ And speak with him before his ghost has flown/ Far from the earth that might not keep him long’. Dreams after dreams Owen wondered in sweat and in love, whether anything was worth remembering other than poetry.

That night he dreamt about Sassoon laying his brown hand on his forearm, his eyes settling on the woven window panes of Craiglockhart’s white rooms and talked of poetry. His heart filled; he remembered his letter in verse, written somewhere in Oxfordshire: ‘Let me attain/ To talk with him, and share his confidence.’ No, he thought, he shan’t talk about the dreams at all. 

In the same letter, he wrote: _I’m well enough by day, and generally so by night. A better mode of life than this present I could not practically manage._ And he went to sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

>  **General Notes**
> 
> 1\. Many passages are either directly or indirectly drawn from Wilfred Owen's _Collected Letters_.
>
>> a. 'This "Wild with All Regrets...' 6 Dec 1917, to Sassoon.  
> b. 'Bouts of awful labor...'/'It will never be painted..' 31 Dec 1917, to Susan Owen.  
> c. 'Perhaps if I write anything in dug-outs...' 1 Sept, 1918, to Sassoon.  
> d. 'Someday, I must tell how we sang, shouted, whistled and danced through the dark lanes...' and 'If the Bridge-players Craig & Lockhart...' 5 Nov 1917, to Sassoon.  
> e. The Ross, Sitwell, Wells, and Bennett meeting: 10 Nov 1917, to Susan Owen; 27 Nov 1917, to Sassoon.  
> f. 'Siegfried is in London, the victim of a British Sniper.' 27 July 1918, to Susan Owen.  
> g. 'The sun is warm, the sky is clear, the waves..' 1 Sept 1918, to Sassoon. Owen is quoting Shelley's _Lines Written in Dejection._  
>  h. 'O my heart/ Be still...' Sassoon's unpublished lines quoted in Owen's letter to his mother, 31 Aug 1918.  
> i. 'The sun blazed into his room...'/'I'm well enough by day...' 22 Aug 1917, to Leslie Gunston.
> 
> 2\. Laurent Tailhade: a duellist who has written two pacifist pamphlets by the end of 1914. He joined the French Army during the war and was a great influence to Owen's early development both as poet and soldier.
> 
> 3\. 'May I?': the dedication to Sassoon for _Wild with All Regrets_ is followed by an asterisk and a note, 'May I?'
> 
> 4\. 'Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted...' From Shelley's _A Defence of Poetry_. Owen has made several references of the text in his own poetry. 
> 
> 4\. 'Spent a hot, cloudless afternoon together.' From _Siegfried's Journey_.
> 
> 5\. 'No other companion': From _The Tempest_. Act 3, Scene 1.
> 
> 6\. 'Romantically beautiful eyes': Owen did describe a boy's eyes thus during his stay in Bordeaux. 
> 
> 6\. Sassoon did threaten Owen that he will stab his leg if he ever returns to the Front.
> 
> 7\. 'The dead are more real than the living...' Sassoon's _Diaries 1920-22_.
> 
> 8\. _Permitte divis cetera_ : Leave the rest to the gods. _Nil desparandum_ : Do not despair; from Horace. Owen's famous response poem _Dulce et Decorum Est_ is first composed around October 1917, then revised between January and March 1918. Sassoon corrected Owen's Latin grammar in the title of the poem _Apologia Pro Poemate Meo_ , written around Nov-Dec 1917. 
> 
> 9\. 'Their last evening was spent at a quiet Club in Edinburgh, Owen ought to leave for London by the midnight train...' Word for word from _Siegfried's Journey._
> 
> 10\. 'Owen had brought as a wedding present a set of eleven apostle spoons- explaining to the groom that the twelfth had been court-martialled for cowardice and was awaiting execution.' From Findlay's _Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff: Solder, Spy, Translator._
> 
> 11\. Owen's brief sexual encounter with Moncrieff is drawn from most biographers' interpretation. The poem quoted there was Verlaine's _Romance sans paroles_. Also worth-noting is Moncrieff's writing about Owen: 'Over the next few months I saw Wilfred become happy again, though his dreams were still nightmares, and this thick hair was shot with white.'
> 
> 12\. Edward Carpenter: his book _The Intermediate Sex_ (1908) and other writings have influenced a generation of writers (among them Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves) on homosexuality. 
> 
> 13\. Gargling/Gurgling/Goggling/Guttering: see draft of _Dulce et Decorum Est_. 
> 
> 14\. 'Blasting little smile': from the famous love-letter (see 5 Nov 1917 letter entry) where Owen wrote 'In effect it is this: that I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on reading this can't hurt me in the least.'


End file.
